AN APPLICATION FOR THE CALCULATION OF WARPING CONSTANT AND OTHER GEOMETRIC PROPERTIES FOR THIN-WALLED ARBITRARY SECTIONS

Resumo

In the design of structures, when loadings that cause torsion and / or buckling are
considered, it is essential to calculate the warping constant. This parameter can be easily obtained by
expressions available in many technical publications, and they are applicable to mono-symmetric or
double-symmetric profiles (standard sections). The problem, however, is to obtain the warping
constant for thin-walled arbitrary sections, without symmetry axes, that can eventually be found in
structural designs. This paper does not focus on the explanation of torsion theories (that was in fact
used) nor the presentation of all expressions that allow the calculation of the warping constant, but
summarizes and organizes them in a computer application. The idea is to offer an easy and friendly
code to the technical community so that undergraduate students and even structural engineers can use
it in their projects. In order to make it comprehensive and employed in the various levels of the
Engineering courses, several other geometric properties were considered, such as centroid and shear
center positions, moments of inertia, radii of gyration, principal moments of inertia, section moduli,
among others. The obtained results are compared with those presented in expressions available in
technical literature and international publications.